


The Wolf and the Hawk

by Siria



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Ladyhawke Fusion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:28:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22820230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: What might have happened if the Tesseract had not been the jewel of Odin's treasure room? ALadyhawkefusion.
Relationships: Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Comments: 10
Kudos: 79





	The Wolf and the Hawk

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Trinityofone and Sheafrotherdon for their advice! A riff on _Ladyhawke_ (1985), one of those movies which is somehow great without necessarily being good.

Consider what might have been if the technician who'd assembled one particular explosive device in early 1943 had made just the smallest mistake: introduced a flaw into the wiring. These things happen. HYDRA's engineers weren't yet subsisting on a cocktail of caffeine and methamphetamines the way they would towards the war's end, but despite all Johann Schmidt's rhetoric they were still human, and humans need sleep, and if humans don't get enough sleep their hands tremble and their quality control slips.

Consider what would have happened if that defective explosive device, concealed inside a slim silver cigarette case tucked into the pocket of one Heinz Kruger, had gone off minutes before Kruger had intended it to—after Howard Stark had flipped the switch on the last stage of Project Rebirth, but before a reluctant Peggy Carter had managed to pull herself away from a spot by Dr Erskine's side. Imagine the explosion and its aftermath: the reek of smoke; the shriek of rending metal as the Vita-Ray Chamber shook apart; the arc taken by shards of glass and droplets of serum and the last stuttering beams of radiation before the machine failed utterly.

Consider how little difference all this might have made, amid all the myriad differences in the multiverse: one Nazi dead a whole half hour before he would otherwise have bit down on a cyanide capsule, and with just as few people to mourn him. The serum still worked; Abraham Erskine still died; a newspaper headline or two never got written. 

But consider this, too: what if the mistake of our insomniac HYDRA technician was not the first difference between _here_ and _there_? Consider what it would mean for the Tesseract to have been the jewel of Frigga's treasure room, not of Odin's—for a witch's magic is powerful, and it permeates everything it touches.

  


*****

  


Peggy could only ever remember fragments of that first day: the long moment after the explosion where she could hear nothing, and then a slowly building crescendo of sound as her hearing returned and the screaming started. The rubble around her and Erskine's body at her feet and the Colonel shouting for medics, backup, someone to tell him what in the Sam Hill had just happened. She'd felt funny, she remembered that, feeling the warm trickle of blood running down her arm where the glass had cut her and her head swimming as it had when she'd been fourteen and had made an ill-advised foray into Aunt Gladys' cooking sherry. Her tongue felt like it had been basted in salt. 

Then there was the sound of rending metal as Steve had forced open the staved-in door of the Vita-Ray chamber, loud even amid the chaos. Steve, but not as Peggy remembered him—taller, certainly, and everywhere more, well, _more_ —and then their eyes met.

"Peg?" His voice hadn't changed.

And the pain began.

That, Peggy remembered perfectly. It stayed with you, it seemed: the first time you felt your bones snap and shrink and hollow themselves out.

  


*****

  


Chester Phillips had never had much truck for sayings about foxholes lacking atheists. He'd served his time on the Western Front. Seen what gas could do to a man; heard the desperate whimpers of a gut-shot boy who'd no chance of living and who knew it. None of that had ever made him call on the Lord. 

Sure, he still walked up the front steps of Grace Episcopal every Sunday he was home, but that was duty, not faith. Seeing what happened to Carter and Rogers… well, maybe that didn't have much to do with faith either, but it sure inclined a man to recall his schoolboy prayers. 

Some of the top brass read Phillips' report about the whole confounded mess and thought there was something here they could work with, see if they could train other wolves to snarl on command. This confirmed something Phillips had thought since at least 1917: there was a damn fool born every minute.

  


*****

  


Think ahead and the differences between _this side_ and _that_ start to pile up. You couldn't have a USO tour if your super soldier wasn't bipedal between sunset and sunrise; you couldn't be part of the SSR's senior staff if you didn't have opposable thumbs between sunrise and sunset. Bond sales didn't take a ten per cent bump in several states across the Lower 48 in the late summer of 1943. Phil Coulson had an entirely different childhood hero, and a park in Brooklyn never became home to a statue of one of the borough's favourite sons. 

But Peggy was Peggy; Steve was Steve. There was still a war to win.

Rumours spread, hushed and confused, among Allied troops in Europe about a new unit working its way through Italy, helping to take Monte Cassino and push north faster than anyone had expected. _A hundred men_ , some said; _a thousand_ , others said, and all of them powered by some new mystery drug that let them take on five, ten, a dozen Nazis at once. There was nothing about it in the papers but anyone could look at a map in the command centre and see how the front lines were stretching forward, slow but steady, almost day by day now.

(One soldier, convalescing at a hospital in Naples, swore that he'd seen this mysterious unit in action. "It's just a dame and a wolf, I'm telling you, only the two of them, this huge, white wolf and it stopped a tank, ripped the gun right off the front of it. Germans shot at it and I swear the bullets didn't even slow it down."

"Yeah?" said the guy in the bed next to him as he flipped through a magazine, "and let me guess, the girl took out two tanks with her bare hands."

"No, she had a Thompson," the soldier said, struggling to sit upright, "just laid out half a battalion, swapping out magazines mid-stride and hardly missing a beat. It was a hell of a thing."

"Sure sounds like it," said the guy in the next bed, because he knew his mom'd clip him over the ear if she ever found out he made fun of a soldier with a head injury just because he was talking nonsense.)

  


*****

  


For a moment, Bucky had the thought that maybe things were starting to go his way. Sure, they were still pinned down and outnumbered and between the rain and the mud he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt his toes. But one half of the Germans had just turned on the other half, and that seemed like it had to be a good sign—the enemy of your enemy was your friend, right? Maybe these guys had decided to desert while the getting was good? That thought was enough to make Bucky feel a little bit warm, even, for a good five seconds—until that first half of the platoon was dead and the surviving ones turned to face the 107th. 

"Hail HYDRA!" they barked in unison, and hefted their guns, and shit, this wasn't how Bucky'd hoped to go out, but it wasn't like you got much of a choice, sometimes. He squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. Let's see how many he could take out before the sons of bitches got him and—

—and from over his head something small arced into the group of HYDRA soldiers and exploded, dropping a good third of them there and then. Right behind the grenade was a man, leaping into the fray and knocking HYDRA goons like bowling pins before reaching the lone tank still in operation and twisting its gun barrel up to the sky with his bare hands. 

Bucky'd never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth so he whooped and led the rest of the fellows up the slope because maybe they had a fighting chance after all.

Of course after it was all over, when the way north to Azzano lay clear before them and Bucky got his first good glimpse at who their lone rescuer had been, he remembered that there was generally a reason why a guy might want to take a peek inside a horse's mouth before buying it. Not that he was objecting to the rescue or the metaphorical horse or anything, but it was a bit of a shock for a guy to realise that America's new secret weapon was actually your best pal. 

Your best pal you thought was a foot shorter and living back in Brooklyn and not, at all, in the army.

"How the hell'd you get so tall?" he spluttered at Steve. "And why do you have a goddamned bird on your shoulder?"

  


*****

  


There wasn't much time between finding Buck and sunset. Steve hugged him, and accepted the cuff upside the head with as much grace as he could muster, and drew Bucky off to one side to tell him what to expect. Steve and Peggy's usual pattern was to avoid interaction with regular soldiers as much as possible—come in, do what had to be done, and slip away—but Steve knew if he did that now, Bucky'd still be yelling at him about it at their grandkids' weddings. 

"So what, you're telling me you're _cursed_?" Bucky said when Steve finished explaining. "Because that's what it sounds like."

Steve shrugged, tilting his head back to look up at the sky. A curse made as much sense as any other way of thinking about it. Peggy was circling high overhead, riding the rolling air of an updraft, but she'd have to come down soon. Even on a cloudy day like today, Steve could sense that the sun was sinking close to the horizon. There wasn't much time. The bones in his wrists were starting to ache. "The scientists don't know what happened. They're not sure if this is just what the serum does, or if the explosion changed something or… Stark keeps trying to come up with an explanation, but mostly he just swears a lot."

Bucky shook his head. "This doesn't make a lick of sense."

"Doesn't need to make sense to be true," Steve said. His jaw ached now, his teeth loosening and lengthening in their sockets. He unbuttoned his shirt and shucked his boots. The sun was about to set. "When you see her, tell her… I don't know." So many times, Steve had thought of writing a note for Peggy to find at sunset, but he'd never been able to figure out what to say. "Tell her I'm sorry."

Night fell.

  


*****

  


Consider what it meant for Steve and Peggy to do this: to fight alongside one another for months, doing their duty while always in anguish. She a hawk by day, he a wolf by night. Never able to touch one another truly in the flesh, never able to speak to one another. All they had were those two moments each day—the tipping point of dusk and dawn when it was neither fully day nor quite night—where they could see one another and almost, almost touch. 

Consider what it meant that they did not know why any of this was happening, or if it would ever end, or that the queen of Asgard could have righted this all in a matter of minutes, if they had known to ask her, or how.

Consider what it meant for Steve and Peggy, that the echoes of Frigga's magic had thought them the right partners for such a working, although they had made no promises nor exchanged no kisses.

  


*****

  


"I just want you to know," Bucky said as they finally made it to the top of the pass and began their descent, "that only you would be a punk enough to volunteer for a science experiment, end up wandering into some kind of witchcraft—" 

"Buck," Steve said on a sigh. 

"—and still manage to drag my sorry ass halfway—"

"Language," Steve said, casting a glance up to where a hawk soared overhead. "Mixed company."

Bucky snorted, scrambling his way down a short stretch of mountainside where the path turned into a section of loose scree. "Very mixed. You finally get a dame to look at you for more than a hot second and she's a bird twelve hours a day—"

"I didn't…" Steve lowered his voice, not sure just how keen Peggy's hearing was in that form. "I didn't _get a dame_ , Agent Carter and I haven't, we've never, _she's_ never—"

Bucky huffed out a laugh. "Brother, I don't know who you think you're fooling, but it ain't me. Ain't her, either."

  


*****

  


Peggy didn't think of herself as particularly miss-ish, but there was something rather lowering about finding herself, night after night, hunkering down behind some scrubby tree on the side of a mountain, trying to pull her knickers on while a large wolf lay on the ground facing away from her with his paws over his eyes and Barnes sat smirking next to him. 

"This really isn't funny, you know," Peggy told Barnes when she finally felt something like presentable, boots laced up and hair tied back. She very much missed being able to apply lipstick, but her last tube was somewhere at the bottom of a small river east of Naples. 

"Oh, I don't know," Barnes said, trying to look straight-faced and failing, "I'm pretty sure this will always be a _little_ bit funny."

And that was what Peggy was afraid of: that they would fight on and on, through this war and whatever came after and that this would never end; that she and Steve would be bound together in this awful, terrible intimacy that kept them side by side but forever apart. She took a steadying breath. It wasn't as if tears would help.

"Carter—" Barnes began, and Peggy couldn't stand to see that look on his face, either. 

"Come on," she said, looking away, shouldering the pack that held Steve's clothes and what little food they had left. "I think we can get in a few miles at least before we bivvy down for the night."

Steve stood, shook himself, and pushed his shaggy head into the palm of her hand before streaking on up the mountainside, a pale blur for them to follow.

  


*****

  


Somewhere in the South Tyrol, they got into a skirmish with a group of HYDRA scouts. It wasn't so tough to take them out—Steve bearing down on them on his motorbike, Bucky sniping from the treeline—but as the last scout fell he got off one last desperate shot with his revolver. The shot arced high and wide, nowhere near Steve or Bucky, but the hawk which had been circling high overhead let out a terrible shriek and began to plummet. 

Steve felt the bullet with the same sickening force as if it had pierced his own flesh. He screamed Peggy’s name and scrambled to try to catch her before she hit the ground. He was quick enough to at least do that, even though he couldn't catch his breath. She nipped feebly at his hand and then her tiny body went limp. It was like his asthma had come back, a metal band drawn tight around his chest because if she died, if she died— 

"There's a town two miles that way," Bucky yelled, running over to them. "We can—"

Steve shook his head, feeling the familiar tug begin under his skin, the trembling in his sinews. The sun was starting to sink towards the horizon. There was no time. She couldn't; she _couldn't_. "No, you, you'll have to take her. Just don't… don't... " He couldn't think what. "Buck, _please_."

And Bucky knew him better than maybe anyone else in the world because he just nodded at Steve, jaw set, and swung a leg over the motorbike. He paused only long enough to be sure that Peggy was cradled safely on his lap before speeding north.

  


*****

  


Gerda never talked much about what she'd seen during the war. Everyone around her had seen as bad as she had, or worse, and who wanted to dwell on what had happened? Only the maudlin, and if there was anything Gerda prized herself on, it was on a lack of sentimentality. 

But she thought more often than she would have liked to admit about that one night, if only because she still couldn't understand it: what she'd seen, what she'd done. Just as she'd been about to let herself out of the town's infirmary for the evening, she startled to find an American in the doorway, panting and mud-spattered and holding out a bird to her with blood-stained hands. 

" _Per favore, il aiuto_ , I… shit, look, all I really got is English or Yiddish, but I need your help. She needs your help. _Please_."

Gerda tried to summon up what little schoolgirl English she still remembered to tell this madman that she was a doctor, not a vet—but before she could say a word, the sun set and for the first time in her life, Gerda saw a miracle. 

She stayed up most of the night, first working on the woman and then sitting by her bedside to be sure that the worst of the danger had passed. The American slept on the floor at the foot of the bed, clearly exhausted and even younger than Gerda had first thought him to be. Gerda found herself dozing once or twice, startling awake each time at what she could have sworn was the mournful howl of a wolf, although there hadn't been wolves in this part of the world since her grandfather was a young boy. She fell asleep properly just before dawn and awoke some hours later to find herself entirely alone. She would have thought she'd imagined it all if it hadn't been for the rumpled bed next to her and the feather sitting on the pillow.

(Gerda was not a maudlin woman, but when she died her grandsons found a glossy brown feather inside an envelope tucked away in the top drawer of her well-ordered desk. It was labelled, in her neat handwriting, _Ein Wunder. 19. Februar, 1944_.)

  


*****

  


The first sunset after that was the first time Bucky had felt… not shock at seeing Steve's bones shift and reshape themselves, an open-mouthed agony, or vague embarrassment at having to close his eyes while Carter got dressed, knowing how his Ma would yell at him if she knew he was spending this much time around a naked lady he wasn't hitched to. 

Bucky didn't feel shock or embarrassment now. He felt ashamed. Ashamed he was seeing something so purely personal, so painful: the way Steve and Carter stared at one another for the too-short moment that wasn't quite day and wasn't quite night, the sob that tore its way free from Steve's throat at the sight of the bandage on Carter's side and the way Carter's lips shaped the words _my darling_. Bucky's own heart hurt in sympathy. 

This moment wasn't for him, but Bucky saw it anyway, and maybe, he thought, a curse was a thing with ripples.

Afterwards, when they were eating cold beans from a tin and trying to work out just how many miles south of Innsbruck they were, Carter looked at him out of the corner of her eye and said, "If that happens again, don't go for help."

Bucky blinked at her, slow to understand. "If…"

"If I'm injured while Steve's human, let me go. Or snap my neck." Carter's voice was steady, but the look on her face was awful: brittle, strained. "It wouldn't take much. And then he'd… he'd be free."

"I couldn't do that. No. No," Bucky said, shaking his head. He'd do anything to keep Steve safe, go to the end of the line and beyond, but he didn't think he was capable of that kind of cold-blooded horror. Besides. "He'd never forgive me, even if he survived it."

Carter looked back down at her meagre dinner and shrugged. The look on her face hadn't changed. "One way or another, this will have to end."

A weight settled, leaden and nauseating, in the pit of Bucky's stomach.

  


*****

  


Consider whether it might tell us something about fate, that although the only mandate Colonel Phillips had given them was _get out there and give 'em hell_ , Steve and Peggy still found themselves tracking westwards, carving a path through Austria and southern Germany until they reached the foothills of the Swiss Alps. Bucky followed along, and gradually so too did a small group of others. Some of them you would recognise from _here_ ; some you wouldn't know from anywhere; all of them were pretty good at knowing leaders when they saw them, and excellent when it came to punching Nazis in the face. 

Consider what it might mean that _there_ too is a Red Skull, with thousands of followers seizing on his bidding as an excuse to hurt others—and that this Red Skull was expecting Steve and Peggy's arrival. 

An answer may well say something about human nature. Steve and Peggy could tell you as much, if they weren't currently otherwise occupied.<

  


*****

  


"So, the Hawk and the Wolf," Johann Schmidt said. He gave the impression of a man completely at his ease—or he would have, if not for the mad glint in his eye and the oddly-shaped gun at his hip, like something out of a pulp comic. Behind him gaped the mouth of the tunnel that had been bored into the mountainside, leading to the last and most formidable of HYDRA's bases. From deep within it, Peggy could hear the thunder of hundreds of soldiers' feet, all in lockstep and getting closer. "I have been expecting your arrival, though perhaps I thought your names to be a little more… metaphorical." 

Peggy hefted her own gun. Steve was a comforting, growling bulk by her side; behind them was the little ragtag group which by now had been following them for a hundred miles or more. They were desperately outnumbered, but Peggy had to believe that it wouldn't matter. "Really?" she said, wide-eyed. "I'm afraid you have the advantage of me, then, because I've not heard of you at all."

That was a lie, and Schmidt knew it, but it was exactly the kind of lie calculated to enrage a man who was as thoroughgoing a narcissist as Peggy had ever met—and it worked. 

Schmidt's mouth twisted into a rictus snarl. "You think you are the only one to be touched by the gods—to be transformed by them?" He lifted his free hand to his face, and then pulled that face away to reveal another one beneath. Even in the twilight gloom, it was like looking at a death's head wrapped in red leather, and it took all of Peggy's training for her not to take an instinctive step backwards. "Erskine thought he had harnessed their might, but he knew _nothing_ of what gifts the gods can bestow on those whom they truly favour."

From behind her, Peggy heard Bucky murmur, "You guys can't do _that_ , right?"

"A discussion for a later time, I think," Peggy said tartly, pushing aside her horror as best she could. The HYDRA soldiers were almost at the entrance to the tunnel, and it was now or ever. She raised her voice. "Jacques, _c'est parti_!"

" _Tout de suite_!" came the answering shout from part way up the mountain side, and then the deafening report of explosive charges detonating, sheering off tonnes of rock and sending them thundering down the slope to seal off the tunnel opening. Schmidt staggered but was unharmed—yet now he was alone and that made the odds much more to Peggy's liking. 

He whirled and snarled at her. " _Du blöde Kuh_!"

"Language!" Peggy snapped. Next to her, Steve's growls took on a new timbre, and she buried one hand in his ruff, steadying him. 

Schmidt unholstered his weapon and flicked a switch on its side. It had a blue cube where the barrel should be, sparks licking around its edges. The gun let out a shriek unlike anything Peggy had ever heard before, so high-pitched that she could barely hear it. But Steve whined, shaking his head—the noise must have been terrible for a wolf—and then charged at Schmidt. 

"You have taken up enough of my time." Schmidt raised the gun and fired it, unleashing a blue-white blast of light that caught up first Steve and then Peggy, and for the second time in her life Peggy knew a kind of pain that made her throw her head back and scream.

  


*****

  


Consider that the Tesseract is not just an object. To say that it's alive isn't quite right, of course, but to say that it has a mind of its own isn't quite wrong either. It is a singularity that is older than time and if it thinks, it's not in a way that human minds can truly understand. But it does have what you and I might, for lack of a better word, term _opinions_. 

Consider that it has quite firm opinions as to who should use it, and for what.

  


*****

  


Bucky knew what Carter looked like, he knew what Steve looked like. It shouldn't have been strange to see them both standing on their own two feet side by side, but after so many months it was—and not even just because Steve was bare-ass naked. The two of them were lit up by the blue light coming from Schmidt's weird gun, and they were human, and seeing an expression of angry bewilderment on the face of a red skull was so weird that Bucky honestly found it almost funny. 

"You should be dead!" Schmidt howled. "The power of the gods—"

Neither Carter nor Steve were paying much attention to him. They were staring at one another like something out of a matinee movie: like they'd both been suspended in time. There were tears running down Steve's face and Carter was smiling and reaching for him, and it wasn't like Bucky wasn't happy for these two crazy kids, but they did have some important things to be worrying about right now. 

"Anyone else feel like dealing with the Nazi whose face fell off or is that just me?" he called out.

At least Steve had the grace to look sheepish when it was all finally over and he was asking Bucky for a spare pair of pants.

  


*****

  


The sun was just coming up when Colonel Phillips and the rest of the 107th finally reached the mouth of a certain Alpine valley. They were braced for a fight, but all they found were Carter and Rogers' little band of miscreants sitting on a pile of boulders, smoking and playing cards. Every blade of grass that might once have grown there was gone and for a half mile in every direction the ground was covered in nothing but black sand. 

Phillips wasn't going to complain about not having to start the day with a firefight against a madman who was setting himself up as old Adolf's rival. He just wasn't going to feel too sanguine about it.

The colonel's jeep rolled to a stop next to the boulder and he squinted up at the nearest sergeant—Barnes, he thought. "Mind telling me what the hell's going on?"

"Colonel," Barnes said, touching a finger to his hat in a lazy salute. "If I knew, I absolutely would."

"Well, you think you could maybe tell me where Schmidt is? Rogers? Carter?"

"Schmidt is, uh, well he's in custody, sir," Barnes said. He held up a burlap sack, knotted at the top. It was nowhere near big enough to hold a grown man, but it was moving and whatever was inside it was making noises like—

"You got a toad in there, son?" Phillips could feel his eyebrows rising. 

"Like I said, sir, I'd explain if I could." Barnes dropped the sack back onto the boulder and then pointed in the direction of the charred remains of a tree. "They might know more." Phillips looked over to see Carter and Rogers with their arms around one another: both of them human, slow-dancing to music only they could hear, the two of them making eyes at one another like love-sick calves. 

"Not enough whiskey in the world to make up for the report I'm going to have to write about this," Phillips said with a sigh.

"On the bright side, sir," Barnes said, "at least you're seeing 'em when they've both got clothes on."

  


*****

  


Consider what magic can do when it's abroad in the world. Consider that there is still a war on, and a Tesseract that's developing a taste for interference in the middle of it all, and that there are still miles to go before Peggy and Steve will be able to place rings on each other's fingers. 

But consider that despite it all, the first time that the sun sets on them and they are still able to hold one another close, to laugh and kiss and cry through it—well, that Steve and Peggy are quite certain that they've found their happily-ever-after.


End file.
